Campaign rallies and political meaning-making

Daniel Paget; Nicole  Beardsworth; Gabrielle  Lynch

doi:10.1080/14662043.2023.2232163

Campaign rallies and political meaning-making

Daniel Paget^* (Corresponding Author), Nicole Beardsworth, Gabrielle Lynch

^*Corresponding author for this work

Politics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

1 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Prior research determines whether politicians at rallies make programmatic, clientelist or personalist appeals. We argue that this reductive approach obscures the variety of meaning-making at rallies. We offer a vision of rallies as complex communicative events, at which multiple actors co- and counterproduce messages in numerous ways. Nonetheless, we argue that there are patterns in meaningmaking at rallies. Rallies are produced in accordance with a genre which guides what components are included in them and how they are interpreted. We argue that rallies produced in that genre fashion and foreground three constructs above others: candidates, collectivities and contests. They fashion
them, among other things, through representative claims. Altogether, we show that rallies are significant sites of political communication in Africa and worldwide.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	235–254
Number of pages	20
Journal	Commonwealth and Comparative Politics
Volume	61
Issue number	3
Early online date	21 Aug 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/14662043.2023.2232163
Publication status	Published - Aug 2023

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements
Thanks go to editors Nicola de Jager and especially Andrew Wyatt for working with us to develop this special issue. Thanks for Michael Saward and Justin Willis for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. Thanks go to all of the contributors to this special issue. Thanks to our anonymous reviewers. Thanks to Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, BIEA, Gilchrist Educational Trust, FCDO and the ESRC (ES/L002345/1and ES/L002108/1) which all contributed to the research behind this article. Thanks to those who attended and gave feedback on these and associated papers at the panels on rallies convened at the African Studies Association (USA) Annual Meetings in Chicago, 2017, and Boston, 2019, the European Conference on African Studies, 2019 and the Political Science Association (UK) Media and Politics Conference, 2019. Thanks, most of all, to all of those in the sites of our research who enabled our research through their insights, assistance, generosity and hospitality. Any errors are ours alone.

Keywords

communication
representative claim-making
performance
media
Identity

Access to Document

10.1080/14662043.2023.2232163Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

Paget_etal_CCP_Campaign_Rallies_And_VOR
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Final published version, 1.7 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

Cite this

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abstract = "Prior research determines whether politicians at rallies make programmatic, clientelist or personalist appeals. We argue that this reductive approach obscures the variety of meaning-making at rallies. We offer a vision of rallies as complex communicative events, at which multiple actors co- and counterproduce messages in numerous ways. Nonetheless, we argue that there are patterns in meaningmaking at rallies. Rallies are produced in accordance with a genre which guides what components are included in them and how they are interpreted. We argue that rallies produced in that genre fashion and foreground three constructs above others: candidates, collectivities and contests. They fashionthem, among other things, through representative claims. Altogether, we show that rallies are significant sites of political communication in Africa and worldwide.",

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